A global perspective on energy – behind the scenes in Milan

As part of World Energy Week, AEMO flew to Milan last week to meet with some of the world’s largest market operators for the GO15 Governing Board and Steering Board meetings.

GO15 brings together international grid operators, servicing more than 3.4 billion people over six continents, to collaborate on shared challenges and emerging issues in the global energy industry.

Our Executive General Manager for Strategy and Innovation Jo Witters, and Future Energy Systems Policy Analyst Taru Veijalainen, took in the Italian sites last week as they joined the discussions.

Highlights included a focus on strategic work needed to manage the global transition to a decarbonised power system, and solid discussion on how new technologies are enabling operators to add greater value to the market.

“Even though there are a multitude of differences between the Grid Operators around the world, we are all facing similar challenges,” said Jo.

“Attending the GO15 events allow us to build a network with international grid operators to discuss how we can collectively work through these emerging issues. We can then bring these insights back home and inform our work programs here in Australia, which is invaluable”.

The meeting also allowed AEMO to showcase some of the work we are doing here in Australia, work that is particularly relevant to other operators given that our country is seeing a rapid uptake of distributed energy resources.

“This was my first year attending a GO15 event, so it was great to get an insight into how the work we have done has been used to develop the working groups for next year, and that some of these challenges are shared amongst all the members,” said Taru.

Check out the below video for a behind the scenes look at the GO15 summit in Milan.

Jo and Taru also had the opportunity to talk to other representatives from PJM, TEPCO, GCCIA, National Grid, SO UPS, ONS, CAISO, CIGRE, and GO15.

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